Republicans Want to Turn Over a New Page
The Foley scandal is no October Surprise
Posted on Tuesday, October 10, 2006. By Ken
Silverstein.

Leading Republicans, with the support of conservative
media outlets, are charging that the Mark Foley
scandal was a plot orchestrated by Democrats to damage
the G.O.P.'s electoral prospects this November.
According to the Washington Post, House Speaker J.
Dennis Hastert appeared on Rush Limbaugh's radio show
and agreed when the host said the Foley story was
driven by Democrats in some sort of cooperation with
some in the media to suppress turnout of conservative
voters before the midterm elections.

Conservative talk-radio host Hugh Hewitt has said that
Hastert had become the target right now of the
left-wing media machine, and House Majority Leader
John Boehner has charged that the release of the Foley
documents so close to the elections is concerning, at
a minimum. Meanwhile, accounts I've heard about the
FBI's initial inquiries suggest the bureau is as
interested in uncovering how the story came to public
attention as it is in investigating Foley's actions.

The Republican leadership is lying when they claim
that Democrats have engineered an October Surprise;
there was never a plan undermine the G.O.P. or to
destroy Hastert personally, as the speaker has
vaingloriously suggested. I know this with absolute
certainty because Harpers was offered the story
almost five months ago and decided, after much debate,
not to run it here on Washington Babylon.

In May, a source put me in touch with a Democratic
operative who provided me with the now-infamous emails
that Foley had sent in 2004 to a sixteen-year-old
page. He also provided several emails that the page
sent to the office of Congressman Rodney Alexander, a
Louisiana Republican who had sponsored him when he
worked on Capitol Hill. Maybe it is just me being
paranoid, but seriously, This freaked me out, the
page wrote in one email. In the fall of 2005, my
source had provided the same material to the St.
Petersburg Timesand I presume to The Miami
Heraldboth which decided against publishing stories.

It was a Democrat who brought me the emails, but
comments he made and common sense strongly suggest
they were originally leaked by a Republican office.
And while it's entirely possible that Democratic
officials became aware of the accusations against
Foley, the source was not working in concert with the
national Democratic Party. This person was genuinely
disgusted by Foley's behavior, amazed that other
publications had declined to publish stories about the
emails, and concerned that Foley might still be
seeking contact with pages.

Though the emails were not explicitly sexual, I felt
strongly that Foley's behavior was inappropriate and
that his intentions were clear. Why would a
middle-aged man ask a teenager he barely knew for his
photograph, or what he wanted for his birthday? I
contacted Foley and he strongly denied any ill intent.
He told me there was nothing suggestive or
inappropriate about his emails to the page, adding
that if the page was intimidated, that's
regrettable.

My theory about the emails was that Foley was throwing
out bait to see if the teen would bite. I spoke to a
Foley staffer who violently rejected that
interpretation of the emails and who blamed the whole
problem on the page, saying it was all a
misunderstanding due to the young boy's overactive
imagination. The staffer also said that Foley's motive
in asking the page for a picture was entirely
innocent: he merely wanted an image of the boy so he
could remember him more clearly in the event that he
wanted a job recommendation down the road. Needless to
say, none of this sounded even remotely convincing.

I tried to contact the page who received Foley's
emails and the boys parents, but got no reply to my
inquiries. However, I did speak with another former
page who'd had an unsettling encounter with Foley. He
was a lot more friendly than you'd expect a
congressman to be, this page told me. He acted like
he was a kid himself. The former page said that on
one occasion when he was still working on the Hill,
Foley asked him and another page if he could accompany
them to the gym, an invitation they declined because
it made them uncomfortable. When the page mentioned
the incident to a congressional intern who worked with
the page program, he was told that Foley had a history
of being too friendly with the pages, and it was
suggested that it would be better to avoid Foley in
the future.

Congressman Alexander's office declined to comment on
the matter, apart from issuing a brief statement
emailed to me on May 31 by press secretary Adam Terry:
When these emails were brought to our attention last
year our office reviewed them and decided that it
would be best to contact the individual's parents.
This decision, on behalf of our office, was based on
the sensitivity of the issue. Our office did, in fact,
contact the parents, and we feel that they (the
juvenile's parents) should decide the best course of
action to take concerning the dialogue outlined in the
emails. I had a number of other questions I wanted to
askfor example, although the ex-page's parents were
understandably concerned about their son's name coming
out in the press, didn't Alexander's office have an
obligation to make sure that Foley was not hitting on
other kids?but Terry did not reply to further
requests for comment.

The final draft of my storywhich did not name the
ex-page who received Foley's emailswas set to run on
June 2. Foley's private life should, under most
circumstances, be his own business, but in this case
there is a clear question about his behavior with a
minor and a congressional employee, went the storys
conclusion. The possibility that he might have used
his personal power or political position in
inappropriate ways, as the emails suggest, should be
brought to public attention.

We decided against publishing the story because we
didn't have absolute proof that Foley was, as one
editor put it, anything but creepy. At the time I
was disappointed that the story was killedbut I must
confess that I was also a bit relieved because there
had been the possibility, however unlikely, that I
would wrongly accuse Foley of improper conduct.

While Harpers decided not to publish the story, we
weren't entirely comfortable with the decision. A few
weeks later I passed along the emails and related
materials to several people who were in a position to
share them with other media outlets. I subsequently
learned that other people had the same information and
were also contacting reporters. (By this point, my
original source apparently had given up on getting the
media to cover the story.)

Among those who received information about the story
but declined to pursue it were liberal outlets such as
Talkingpointsmemo.com, Americablog.com, and The New
Republic (The Hill, Roll Call, and Time magazine also
had the Foley story, though I'm not certain when it
came to their attention.) [Update, October 10, 2006
2:00PM: Talking Points Memo did not have access to the
emailsand it's possible that other publications named
here did not eitherbut all, at minimum, were aware of
the salient facts of the case.] Ironically, it was
ABCwhich just weeks ago was being defended by
Republicans and attacked by Democrats for airing The
Path to 9/11that finally ran the story. The network
obtained the emails from a person who is scrupulously
non-partisan.

That was my experience of the Foley affair.

If this was all a plot to hurt the G.O.P.s chances in
the midterm elections, why did the original source for
the story begin approaching media outlets a full year
ago? If either of the Florida papers had gone to press
with the story last year, or if Harper's had published
this spring, as the source hoped, the Foley scandal
would have died down long ago. A stronger case could
be made that the media, including Harpers, dropped
the ball and inadvertently protected Foley and covered
up evidence of the congressmans misconduct.

The source who brought me the story didn't see it as a
grand piece of electioneering. He viewed it as a story
about one individual, Mark Foley, and his
inappropriate and disturbing behavior with teenagers.
The G.O.P. and its friends in the media are trying to
concoct a conspiracy in order to divert attention from
the failure of Republican officials to deal properly
with Foley.

It is now absolutely clear that Foley was indeed a
menace to kids working on Capitol Hill. In seeking to
malign the parties who sought to expose his conduct,
top Republicans reveal that they are far more outraged
by the possibility that the scandal might harm their
partys prospects in November than they are by Foley's
behavior.

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